My discussion this week is with Eric Shamow of Puppet Labs. He'll be presenting at our upcoming DevOps Seminar on October 18th. We took a little time to discuss DevOps in general, and Puppet in some specifics.

Part two will be a deeper dive into Puppet itself. Look for that podcast in early September.

Puppet Labs has recently put up a great getting started guide which should really help folks who want to get started. This page comes with a link to a training VM that you can use to get started with Puppet right away: http://docs.puppetlabs.com/learning

Philly Emerging Technologies Podcast 2011 - #1

Polyglot Persistence for Java Developers

Speaker - Chris Richardson, VMware

From the ETE Session Abstract

Relational databases have long been considered the one true way to persist enterprise data. But today, NoSQL databases are emerging as a viable alternative for many applications. They can simplify the persistence of complex data models and offer significantly better scalability, and performance. But using NoSQL databases is very different than the ACID/SQL/JDBC/JPA world that we have become accustomed to. They have different and unfamiliar APIs and a very different and usually limited transaction model. In this presentation, we describe some popular NoSQL databases – Redis, SimpleDB, MongoDB, and Cassandra. You will learn about each database’s data model and Java API. We describe the benefits and drawbacks with using NoSQL databases. Finally, you will learn how the Spring Data project simplifies the development of Java applications that use NoSQL databases.